Learn About Lodz

Lodz, Poland, was a flourishing industrial city in the mid-1800s with a successful textile sector and a mixture of Polish,
German and Czech inhabitants. In 1939, after WWII began, the German Army invaded Lodz and later renamed it "Litzmannstadt."
As the Nazi regime terrorized the city and destroyed Polish monuments, Catholic churches and Jewish synagogues, many members of
the Jewish population fled to other European countries. In early 1940, the Nazis rounded up more than 160,000 of the remaining Jews -
including Henryk Ross - and forced them into the Lodz Ghetto. The Nazis then isolated the Lodz Jews from the rest of the world using barbed wire,
sentry booths and a German police patrol.

The ghetto, outlined on this map, was an area of less than 4.13 square kilometres situated in the poorest part of the city.
The conditions in the Lodz Ghetto were atrocious from the start, and steadily deteriorated until the summer of 1944,
when the Nazis sent most of the remaining residents to death camps.